As regular readers will know, jury votes were reintroduced in 2009 to counteract accusations that Eurovision was all about voting for the neighbours. The final result is decided 50/50 between the professionals and the public, who phone and text in their votes. But 2014 is the first year the jury names were released to the public – and that means there’s an unprecedented amount of information for Eurovision geeks to pore over.

Getting in there early with some incisive analysis of European attitudes to Conchita’s gender-bending act is Alan Renwick, Associate Professor in the Politics and International Relations department at the UK’s Reading University. He’s crunched the numbers and shown it’s the public, not professionals that love Conchita – she didn’t make the top five of the jury vote in sixteen countries.

“And here there does seem to be more of an east–west split: seven of the nine countries giving Austria no votes on this measure are in the former communist world (San Marino and, surprisingly, Germany are the exceptions)”

But while Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus all put Conchita among the lowest placed acts, it’s worth thinking about tactics as well. Having been in the arena during rehearsals, Conchita was by far the crowd’s favorite. So, say, Armenia – topped by bookies for success before ending up in fourth place – wouldn’t want to give huge points to a rival. That’s possibly overly cynical of your correspondent — but then we’re talking about Eurovision, so anything’s possible. Including a mass gay wedding.

Worth noting: There is a certain threshold in every country for the minimum amount of televotes for a valid vote. This was not reached in Albania and San Marino, so they voted on juries alone. Georgia, meanwhile, only had a public vote. That’s the same Georgia which got chucked out over an anti-Putin song in 2009 so let’s just say their approach to the rules is, ahem, flexible.

What other insight can we gain from the voting breakdown? For more, click here.